Thursday, March 8, 2012
Time hovers by at great speed; here comes 3rd year. Attachment is on its way.
Monday. This Monday will be the start of my 12weeks at JP Unity. Afterwhich I will be having attachment at NCC for another 12weeks. Seems like I will be a lone ranger for these 6months.
My classmates and I had class outing yesterday at MBS. Really had a memorable and wonderful time together; played true/dare, twister, gobble down junk food, had hearty chats, joking around like there is no tomorrow. Will miss a lot of them. How melancholic can I be...
I have been pondering and also meditating on the book of Jonah these few days, after Ps Kim Meng spoke about him in the sermon. I realised that I am indeed like Jonah in certain ways. Jonah was a minor prophet in the old testament. When God asked him to go to Nineveh to prophesy to this wicked nation, Jonah actually rejected this call of the Lord and when in the opposite direction of Nineveh.
The reason why Jonah did so is because he hated Nineveh so much as they were the enemies of the people of God. They were so corrupted and cruel. So after Jonah was thrown into the sea by the sailors and was swallowed by a big fish and stayed in the stomach of this fish for 3days and 3nights, and was finally vomitted out, he decided to follow God's commmand and prophesied to this nation.
Though this nation was so wicked and depraved, God was so compassionate that He sent Jonah to speak His word, and this nation repented and wore sackcloth. But Jonah sat from afar and looked at this nation, hoping and longing for this nation to be destroyed by God. Of course that did not happen.
After digesting these words, I discovered that, yes, I indeed feel that some people should die, should be destroyed, whom should not deserve God's forgiveness. Because of that, I realised that I lacked the compassion that God has and wants me to have for these people.
What exactly is compassion? To show compassion to the needy, to the elderly, to orphans, to the less advantaged can be easy. But showing compassion to those that torture humans in a terrible way before leading to a trajic death, to those that humiliated you, to those that betrayed you; will you still show compassion to them? That was a lesson learnt from the book of Jonah. I was that Jonah. There is much for me to learn about compassion.
Mark Tan at 12:04 PM
